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Boomtown is a mindblowing adventure and experience that never ceases to amaze.

Much more than just a music festival, this annual counter-culture extravaganza sees the Hampshire countryside transformed into a sprawling pop-up city, featuring interactive film-sets filled with twisted alleyways - and even more twisted characters.

Featuring a hidden narrative, the most recent reappearance of this Brigadoon-like metropolis – Chapter 11: Radical City – was its most ambitious, and not just in terms of scale and spectacle.

The latest instalment of this ever evolving kaleidoscope of stages and street venues, held over the weekend of August 7-12, aimed to change the world – or at least how its ‘citizens’ treat the planet we share.

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From the post-apocalyptic and Bladerunner-esque cyberslums of its six downtown districts, to the historic harbour of ‘Old Town’ with its seaside shacks and the Town Centre with its Job Centre, Inconvenience Store and Boomtown Bobbies police station, through the ostentatious playboy playground of Paradise heights with its ballroom, burlesque bars and hotel - and on to the industrialising wild west town of Copper County with its saloons and foundries - Boomtown satirises the world we have created around us.

Some of the inhabitants Dstrkt5, Downtown at Boomtown 2019 (Image: George Harrison)

Exploring the Boomtown storyline at Copper County in 2019 (Image: Garry Jones)

A meeting of a myriad of tribes, Boomtown has always seen wide-eyed ravers and frothing punks, patchouli-scented hippies and psytrance crusties, reggae dreads and thrash metal headbangers, electro-swingers, hip hop hoodlums and techno fist-pumpers, come together in a spirit of unity.

In these divided times, that in itself inspires hope for our future.

However, that future faces a greater threat than humanity’s apparent inability to co-exist in harmony – and it is a threat festivals have contributed to massively, in terms of their huge carbon foot print, conspicuous consumption of resources, and reliance on single-use plastics and other items wrongly branded as ‘disposable’.

Chapter 11 was the start of not just a new story for Boomtown, but a journey that the festival – and indeed us and our battered and bruised Blue planet - will only survive if we make radical changes and create a truly Radical City.

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With eco-activists Extinction Rebellion a very visible presence, the opening ceremony in the natural amphitheatre of Lion’s Den – beneath the dreaming spires of its huge temple-like stage – revealed the efforts being made to turn over a new page in the festival’s history, and be the change the world needs to see.

Boomtown 2019 opening ceremony at Lion's Den (Image: Tom Martin)

The Lions Den Stage at Boomtown 2019

Some 25,000 of the 66,000 people at Boomtown came together at this ceremony to call for food and clean water for very person on Earth. And they discovered that every Boomtown attendee had been bought a tree – so a huge forest will now grow as a direct result of the festival. The scourge of plastic pints had also been eradicated by the use of a biodegradable alternative – and, by the end of the festival, campsite waste had been reduced by a whopping 70 per cent.

Sadly though, it seems some selfish people still need educating, given the number of tents (admittedly far fewer than in previous years) – abandoned in the campsites when the festival finally finished after five nights of magical madness. ‘Take your shit home with you’, as singer Beans on Toast urged in a song commissioned by Boomtown, during his joyous and uplifting set in the sunshine on Sunday afternoon the Town Centre stage.

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This ‘Leave no Trace’ message was driven home at the jaw-dropping main stages during the climactic closing ceremonies, which pulled-together the strands of this year’s storyline - that could be discovered in the interactive theatre experiences with pirates, cowboys and a motley crew of other mad characters, if you delved deeply enough into Boomtown’s countless doorways.

Boomtown wants to save the world

Boomtown's Oldtown District (Image: Benjamin Paul)

The gargantuan Relic and Nucleus stages had almost literally evolved from their industrial incarnations last year, when they were the Bang Hai Corporation Tower and the Sector Six Nuclear power plant, into something much more organic and mysterious.

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As lasers, spotlights, pyrotechnics and flamethrowers blossomed, and with social media and technology watching, tracking and insidiously influencing our movements and thought processes in the real world, Boomtown’s Radical City saw the natural world mutate and use these tools to fight back, and guide citizens towards the sustainable way of living we must adopt if we are to survive.

The Nucleus Stage at Boomtown (Image: Paul Benjamin)

The Relic Stage at Boomtown 2019

Like all the best entertainment, Boomtown is a thought-provoking thrill ride, with a message too important to be ignored.

But Boomtown isn’t some hand-wringing preachfest: it also delivers in terms of the music, with a eclectic mix of artists ranging from rockers like Napalm Dead and the Slaves, to electronic artists like Four Tet and Groove Armada and legends like Lauren Hill - even if the latter turned up more than an hour late and gave an arrogant and unapologetic cameo, rather than the spectacular headline show her fans deserved and expected after sacrificing everything else Boomtown has to offer to watch her apathetic performance.

My personal highlight was probably Carl Cox’s epic set of hypnotic, dark, throbbing, techno in the pulsating presence of the Nucleus super-stage.